The dramatic growth of the popularity of amateur photography over the past two decades has resulted in a substantial increase in the number and kind of merchants involved in and interested in being involved in photoprocessing. Whereas previously available processing options were limited to those provided by photographic specialty stores and mail-order facilities, more recently grocery and drug stores and other mass merchandisers affiliated with central processing laboratories have begun to offer such services as well. In addition, "one-hour mini-lab" facilities using relatively new and sophisticated processing equipment have commenced soliciting customers directly. The advent of this sophisticated processing technology also has decreased the start-to-finish time for most print photoprocessing to approximately forty minutes, significantly less than was previously required.
Even though modern technology has minimized the actual time needed for processing certain photographic products (i.e. "one-hour" pictures), the total period from exposure of the last frame of a roll of film until retrieval of the finished prints frequently remains much longer. Each of the above-mentioned systems suffers from a flaw which contributes to the overall delay in obtaining the completed products in that none operates entirely at the convenience of the consumer. Mail-order photoprocessing, for example, depends upon the postal system for transmitting the goods to and from the processing laboratory. Consequently, a patron depositing his film must await the next postal collection and wait for the mail to arrive at and return from the facility and be delivered to him. Depositing the film at "one-hour" processing laboratories, where the processing is completed on the premises, eliminates the need to use the postal system. However, the customer remains subject to the operating hours of the store. If the facility is closed when the patron desires to deposit his film for processing, he has no alternative but to wait until it next is open.
While grocery and drug stores which are open twenty-four-hours per day cure the problem of timely access to the deposit and retrieval location, the associated processing systems are not without problems either. In most stores, a customer (or a sales clerk) merely prints personal and processing information on the exterior of an envelope, places the film in it and drops the envelope into a sealed container for later collection or leaves it with the clerk. To obtain the processed pictures, however, the customer must locate a sales clerk who must in turn locate the finished pictures and collect payment in exchange for the prints. Maintaining a clerk present at all hours greatly increases the overall cost of the photofinishing system and results in a substantially reduced profit to the service provider. The customer frequently also must provide an identification means, such as a claim check or receipt, so that the clerk can visually determine that the person receiving the prints is the one whose name appears on the deposit envelope.
In an effort to solve these problems and provide a faster and more efficient method of handling the film, the industry has begun developing automated deposit and retrieval devices analogous to automated teller machines (ATMs) used widely by the banking trade. One such photographic vending and dispensing system, disclosed in European Patent Application Number 87301311.4 (publication number 0 234 833) filed by Sabbagh, includes a freestanding, computerized apparatus which accepts a customer's credit card along with film to be processed. Once the processing (accomplished at another location) is complete the film and prints are deposited in the apparatus to await the customer's return. To obtain the processed products the customer inserts his credit card for identification and payment purposes. At no time must the customer locate and confront a human store clerk to obtain the finished goods.
Even though the interface with the customer disclosed in Sabbagh is completely automated, humans continue to perform two significant functions during the handling of the film. Initially, someone must collect the undeveloped film, transport it to the remote processing laboratory, and, to the extent the processing operation itself is not fully automated, participate in the developing procedure. Significantly, the Sabbagh application discloses no means by which to track the film through the processing laboratory and thereby avoid errors in matching the processed film with the intended recipient. In addition, after processing the person returning the finished products to the vending apparatus must manually insert each package into its matching compartment. Once all of the packages are inserted into compartments bar codes on each package are optically read. If one or more packages are inserted into improper compartments they are ejected from the apparatus, forcing the operator to reinsert them properly. Thus, it appears that a single error early in the insertion effort would result in virtually all of the packages being rejected and would require substantial effort to correct.